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Are all duplicate contents bad?

We were badly hit by Panda back in January 2012. Unfortunately, it is only now that we are trying to recover back.

CASE 1:We develop software products. We send out 500-1000 word description about the product to various download sites so that they can add to their product listing. So there are several hundred download sites with same content.

How does Google view this? Did Google penalize us due to this reason?

CASE 2:

In the above case the product description does not match with any content on our website. However, there are several software download sites that copy and paste the content from our website as the product description. So in this case, the duplicate content match with our website.

How does Google view this? Did Google penalize us due to this reason?

Along with all the download sites, there are also software piracy & crack sites that have the duplicate content.

So, should I remove duplicate content only from the software piracy & crack sites or also from genuine download sites?

Does Google reject all kind of duplicate content? Or it depends on who hosts the duplicate content?

3 Responses

Good questions, it really hard to say what Google determines as duplicate content so this will just be my hunch on your issue. As I have experienced Google won't 'penalize' you as you're the owner of the content and you can't be the victim of other people stealing or copying your content. Also if you have provided these sites with your content. Mostly because you're often not in charge of the content management on somebodies elses site.

For all new content it is important to get indexed fast. There is the scenario that if your site is crawled infrequently another site may get that copy indexed first and by default is viewed as theirs. So with any new content I would post on social media as quickly as possible - G+, Twitter etc to get noticed and to mark as yours. G+ author attribute will help.

It is tricky. As Michael said it is important to get your content indexed first, which can help identify you as the source. Google doesn't always do a great job of that. Generally, I don't worry too much about Case 1, but in your case, it can be tougher. The problem is that many download sites can have very high authority and could start outranking you for these product descriptions. If that happens, it's unlikely you'd be penalized, but you could be filtered out or knocked down the rankings, which might feel like a penalty.

Here's the thing, with Case 1, though. If these download sites are simply outranking you, but you're distributing product, is it so awful? I think you have to look at the trade-off through the lens of your broader business goals.

Case 2 is tougher, since there's not a lot you can do about it, short of DMCA takedowns. You've got to hope Google sorts it out. Again, getting in front of it and getting your content in the index quickly is critical.

If you were hit by Panda, I'd take a hard look at anything on your own site that could be harming you. Are you spinning out variations of your own content? Are you creating potentially duplicate URLs? Are you indexing a ton of paginated content (internal searches, for example). You may find that the external duplicates are only part of your Panda problem - if you can clean up what you control, you'll be much better off. I have an extensive duplicate content write-up here:

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